When Pulp released Different Class in October 1995, it was at the peak of the Britpop era – less a cultural movement and more a label the music press had slapped on a collection of disparate (though mostly white, guitar-based) British bands infiltrating the charts in the mid-90s. What started as a celebration of the British music industry reasserting its influence after a few years dominated by the US grunge scene had morphed into something of a media bandwagon.
The year had already seen UK number one albums by Elastica, Supergrass, The Charlatans, Black Grape and The Boo Radleys. By that summer Britpop had reached – depending on your point of view – either its apex or nadir, when Blur and Oasis were involved in a chart battle that dominated newspapers and made the BBC’s Six O’Clock News. Blur won that first round and released their fifth album, The Great Escape, a few weeks later. Oasis followed with (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, which would go on to become the biggest-selling record of the decade in the UK.
Pulp had no interest in the Britpop tag, yet 30 years on, its Different Class not only feels like the most enduring snapshot of a mid-90s Britain on the cusp of a New (Labour) era, coming down from the acid-house boom and looking ahead to the millennium – but, with its tales of illegal raves, class divisions and uncertain futures – still feels the most relevant today.
To a casual music fan, it might have felt like Pulp appeared out of nowhere in 1995 – when within the space of weeks their single Common People hit number two in the charts, they played a triumphant Glastonbury headline set and frontman Jarvis Cocker became an unlikely tabloid fixture. It had actually been almost two decades in the making. Cocker formed the band in Sheffield in 1978, when he was just 15 years old.
The album was released in the UK at the height of Britpop. It followed from the success of their breakthrough album His 'n' Hers the previous year. Two of the singles on the album – "Common People" (which reached number two on the UK Singles Chart) and "Disco 2000" (which reached number seven) – were especially notable, and helped propel Pulp to nationwide fame.
The inspiration for the title came to frontman Jarvis Cocker in Smashing, a club night that ran during the early 1990s in Eve's Club on Regent Street in London. Cocker had a friend who used the phrase "different class" to describe something that was "in a class of its own". Cocker liked the double meaning, with its allusions to the British social class system, which was a theme of some of the songs on the album. A message on the back of the record also references this idea: "We don't want no trouble, we just want the right to be different. That's all."
When the band went back into the studio to finish recording their fifth album, it was with the knowledge that they finally had the captive audience they’d waited so long for. “We felt that the next record was our chance, it was our time, it was our springboard into the public's consciousness, a chance to reach out to those people who hadn’t cottoned on to us yet,” says Banks. Pulp had been on the margins for so long. The idea that finally we were going to be exposed to a greater audience was a delicious sort of feeling.
Much of the writing for the record took place above a pottery warehouse owned by Banks' family. "We would set homework, where you'd have to come to the next rehearsal with some song idea – a word, a bit of a tune, a phrase, a scenario, anything, "says Banks. "We'd swap instruments so that no one was getting too big for their boots. It was a great time of everyone being together and having input. And, you know, thinking that we were on the cusp of something."
As on His 'n' Hers before, Different Class saw Cocker return to one of his favourite subjects, sex, on songs like Underwear and Pencil Skirt. But his observations also moved out of the bedroom to focus on the class divide, something that he and other band members had become increasingly aware of.
As part of the chart battle between Blur and Oasis, those two bands had seen not only their songs pitted against one another, but their class, often in the simplest and most patronising of ways. Oasis were the northern working-class lads who loved drinking beer and getting into scrapes. Blur were the middle-class art-school southerners whose lyrics quoted Balzac.That these two versions of UK life were the only ones presented itself showed an inherent problem with Britpop. Blur v Oasis, that whole scene… it had no idea what was going on in black music, in Asian music. It was just oblivious. And if you were going to participate in the spirit of the 90s, you had to participate in that – in music that often you had no interest in or knowledge of, that often had nothing to do with the way you’d grown up, the records in your house.
Meanwhile Pulp – who confused those stoking the pantomime class war by having members that managed to be both northern, working class and go to art school in London – were too busy writing about class wars to participate in them. On Common People Cocker tore into class tourists, inspired by a well-to-do Greek girl he met at Central Saint Martins who wanted to try slumming it in Hackney for a while – "smoke some fags and play some pool, pretend she never went to school". Hidden underneath those irresistible pop hooks is a mounting anger not just at her but all those who co-opt a working-class identity as a shortcut to authenticity – without ever dealing with the fear, uncertainty and absence of choice that comes with having no money.
His anger is even more palpable on I Spy, a song in which someone who has nothing observes those who have everything. Pulp had spent most of their lives on the outside looking in, making them the perfect champion of the disempowered
Pulp had spent most of their lives on the outside looking in, making them the perfect champion of the disempowered. “Being able to observe without being observed yourself, you get to see the real sort of underbelly or workings of what goes off in life,” says Banks. No detail passed Cocker by, from “the broken handle on the third drawer down of the dressing table” (F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E) to the “woodchip on the wall” in Disco 2000. His stories were specific, but reflected a wider society, too – as in Sorted for E’s and Whizz, a song inspired by Cocker attending raves in the late 80s. “Is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel, or just 20,000 people standing in a field?” With illegal raves now on the rise again in the UK, he could easily be talking about 2020, not 1988. In fact, aside from calls to “meet up in the year 2000”, so much of the album and its themes of being young and out of options feels pertinent in the current day.
The album reached number one and went on to win the Mercury Music Prize. A sell-out arena tour followed. Pulp were no longer the outsiders. It felt good – to begin with, at least. “When you’ve been in the desert so long and you reach the oasis you jump in and fill your boots,” says Banks.
The sleeve design was created by Blue Source. Initial copies of the CD and vinyl album came with six double-sided inserts of alternative cover art, depicting cardboard cutouts of the band photographed in various situations. A sticker invited the listener to "Choose your own front cover". In all standard copies thereafter these 12 individual covers made up the CD booklet, with the wedding photograph used as the actual cover.
Different Class received widespread acclaim from music critics in the UK. THe album was a deft, atmospheric, occasionally stealthy and frequently booming, confident record. Arguments about Blur versus Oasis are irrelevant. Pulp are in a different class. Different Class is the sound of Jarvis Cocker keeping score – with delicious accuracy." Different Class has aged very well, possessing that timeless quality that is present in all classic albums, but is still obviously a product of its time, a snapshot of mid-'90s life in the UK. Along with Blur's Parklife, it remains the high point of the Britpop era; music, lyrics, production, artwork, it's as perfect as it gets.
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